His crime caused a war

Hans Koning's novel about the schoolboy assassin whose shot was heard round the world on June 28, 1914, is more than a historical tale. It is an essay on the anatomy of tyrannicide, and a powerful evocation of the mind of a teen‐age revolutionary. Written in a seemingly artless style, it reflects on contemporary order and disorders. In its fable‐like form, it projects a believable image of the activist hero — even if it does not answer all the questions it raises.

Koning—who has written several novels under the name of Hans Koningsberger — opens Gavrilo Princip's story in the youth's prison cell three years after he shot and killed Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria‐Hungary in Sarajevo on the eve of World War I. Though Gavrilo has achieved his goal—the assassination of the symbol of the hated Austro‐Hungarian Empire by one of its subject peoples—he has failed to bring about his own death. The poison he bought from a Belgrade pharmacist has only made him retch; the Austrian Government has refused to execute him because he was only 18 years old. The conditions under which he lived in his cell in Theresienstadt, however, exact their toll; Gavrilo dies six months before the end of World War I.

Koning tells the story through Gavrilo's “mind”—a brief foreword and a concluding fictional reminiscence provide the only other commentary. Gavrilo is a bright high‐school dropout, expelled for taking part in a Sarajevo freedom march. After a visit to his father's farm, he moves on to Belgrade in the free state of Serbia. Here he meets with other student exiles, and when they discover in a newspeper clipping that the Archduke will visit Sarajevo that summer, a sense of destiny takes hold. The response does not come from, conscious meditation: “I heard myself say, ‘What I mean is, the only proper response to his visit, the only action that would be commensurate, would be, to kill him.’”

His seemingly casual statement becomes commitment. The rest is fate. A friend lends him weapons. Two Bosnian Mends join his plot. On the day of the assassination Gavrllo is able to cross police lines because he meets a school acquaintance, the son of a local official. A short time later the Archduke rides in an open car past Gayrilo, who is so fascinated that he stares at him and lets the car go by. In the moment in which he denounces himself for his human failing — his absorption in observation rather than action—the Archduke's car backs up. The car stops, as if waiting for a sign. Gavrilo is so close to the Archduke he can look into his eyes and onto the fluffy hat of the Archduke's wife, who sits beside him. He cannot miss his second chance, and he shoots.

Later, in remembering. Gavrilo will say history conspired with him, for the possibilities of success were slim, yet fate or luck provided every opportunity. Koning evokes this same wonder, that the plan of a schoolboy succeeded against the Empire's mighty police forces.

In his foreword Koning makes mention of the freedom marches of Balkan schoolboys. This is the closest he comes to an explicit parallel to contemporary student protests. The implicit parallels, however, seem everywhere. If no man is free of his past, then no history is saved from a contemporary view of it. When the implied parallels of past and present history are pressed too hard, the story veers toward a discussion, and the novel becomes a mixed bag of history, myth, speculation. Koning's stirring narrative about young men who dare to break one moral law in the name of a Presumed higher one turns into a philosophical commentary on history. Though tyrannicide does not necessarily lead to something better, in Gavrilo's view it is necessary to destroy one lock on the door of history to make a new opening possible. Change by its very nature allows for other change, and the prospect of change for the better stirs people to action. Though Koning (through Gavrilo's mind) admits that a new empire of “moneygreed and iron” rose as a result of Gavrilo's deed, he suggests that the struggle for a better world has not ended.

Koning's performance in presenting this view is impressive and moving. He has, however, so shaped his material that some scenes, though effective, show their designs too pointedly. And other aspects of the schoolboy's vision are blocked off to sustain a single perspective. Such a blocking device may appear necessary to keep some kind of order in the maelstrom of things. But it is single‐minded and self‐serving. We are left, then, knowing that the truth for any individual is only pure enough to guide him one step at a time. ■

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